Pan Am Clippers....

I am deviating from politics and other serious stuff and going for my favorite subjects......AIRPLANES!

      I saw this here

   I remember when Pan Am was a very big airline and had a reputation like no other, one of the highpoints of the company's career was The Clippers.  The article was assembled from several sources including Wiki.

Pan Am Clipper Flying Boats

Dining Room of Boeing Clipper

Pan Am Clipper flying boats were the first true intercontinental passenger airplanes; they crossed the Atlantic and Pacific and circled Latin America in the 1930′s and 1940′s.

The first Pan American flying boat to be called a Clipper was the Sikorsky S-40.  The plane was a rugged, capable aircraft that extended Pan Am’s routes around Latin America, but it had been built with old-fashioned tried-and-true technology, rather than modern technical innovations, and it’s high-drag design of exposed struts and wires earned it the nickname of “flying forest.”

S-42
Role	Flying boat airliner
National origin	United States
Manufacturer	Sikorsky Aircraft
Designer	Igor Sikorsky
First flight	March 30, 1934 (prototype)
Introduction	1934
Status	Retired, none remaining
Primary user	Pan American Airways
Number built	10
Developed from	Sikorsky S-40

The Sikorsky S-42 was a 1930s commercial flying boat designed and built by Sikorsky Aircraft to meet a 1931 requirement from Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) for a long-range transatlantic flying boat.

Design and development

Based on the earlier Sikorsky S-40 that flew in 1931, Igor Sikorsky and Charles Lindbergh (who was working at the time as a consultant to Pan American Airways) laid out plans for a new, larger flying boat. During the S-40's inaugural flight on November 19, 1931, the two visionaries began preliminary sketches on the back of a menu in the S-40's lounge.^{[citation needed]}
Pan Am's president, Juan Trippe, had a similar vision of an aircraft able to span oceans. The new design provided for an increased lifting capacity to carry enough fuel for a 2,500 mi (4,000 km) nonstop flight against a 30 mph (48 km/h) wind, at a cruising speed far in excess of the average operating speed of any flying boat at that time.^{[citation needed]} Pan Am was also courted by Glenn Martin, but Sikorsky's S-42 was delivered first, as the Martin M-130 was still almost a year away from completion.

 Operational history

Sikorsky S-42, aircraft registration NC-822M, "Brazilian Clipper", Pan American Airways, 1934

Flying for Pan American Airways, a total of 10 S-42s were built, manufactured by the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Aircraft Corporation in Stratford, Connecticut. The prototype first flew on March 30, 1934.
The S-42 only served with Pan American Airways. It was used on many routes, including the San Francisco - Hawaii, New York - Bermuda, and Hong Kong -China The S-42 named the Pan Am Clipper was used to survey the route from the US West Coast to China, making the first survey flight from Alameda, California to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in April 1935. ^[1]
The S-42 was also known as the Flying Clipper and the Pan Am Clipper.^[2]
British Marine Aircraft Ltd. was formed in February 1936 to produce S-42-A flying boats under licence in the United Kingdom but nothing came of this. The company built a factory on the western side of the Hamble peninsula with a slipway to Southampton Water. When the deal fell through the company was sold to Henry Folland, who renamed it Folland Aircraft Limited.^[3]
In 1938 and 1939, this type of flying boat was the only one known to land in the Kingman Reef (on its journey between Hawai'i and American Samoa).
All Sikorsky S-42s were either scrapped or destroyed in accidents.

The streamlined Sikorsky clipper that followed — the S-42 — was a much more modern airliner, and the S-42 was used both in regular service around Latin America, and also as a survey plane pioneering the trans-pacific routes that would be flown by the next advance in flying boat design, the Martin M-130.

The most famous Martin clipper, and perhaps the most famous flying boat of all time, was Pan American’s China Clipper, which made the first scheduled air mail flight across the Pacific, in November, 1935, flying from San Francisco to Manila with stops at Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake, and Guam.  The four engine Martin flying boat had a range of 3,200 miles, but was only able to carry 8-10 passengers on the longest leg of the flight, from California to Hawaii.  Passengers slept in individual berths on the overnight flight from San Francisco to Hawaii, and stayed in Pan Am hotels during their overnight stays at Midway, Wake, and Guam.

The B-314 Boeing Clipper, introduced in 1939, was the high point of flying boat design, and Pan Am began the world’s first heavier-than-air passenger service across the Atlantic ocean using the B-314 Boeing clipper.   (The German airship Hindenburg had pioneered regularly scheduled passenger flights between Europe and America three years earlier, in 1936.) The Boeing clipper had a range of 3,500 miles and could could carry 74 passengers in luxurious lounges and private sleeping compartments.